What The New Coach and Center Mean for Semin

The Washington Capitals have acknowledged that Alexander Semin, their second best goal scorer, might leave as an unrestricted free agent this summer. They've publicly accepted the fact. They've taken a "wait and see approach." But they've also made all the right moves to make Washington the most attractive destination in the league for any free agent goal scorers who might be looking. In the last week, the Caps have replaced the defense-first coach who drove Semin to say he's leaving with one of the best offensive minds in the business and upgraded their team to finally provide a second-line center who can get Semin the puck.

In hiring Adam Oates, the Capitals have picked up a coach who understands offense and understands how to run a power play. As a player, Oates turned Brett Hull, Joe Juneau and Peter Bondra into the best goal scorers they could be. As an assistant coach coach, Oates just helped New Jersey take advantage of Ilya Kovalchuk and Zach Parise on their power play and reach the Stanley Cup Finals. Peter Bondra has been quick to praise Oates' defensive understanding as well, but Semin should recognize old friends just being nice to each other.

On the second line, the Caps finally have second center who can dish the puck effectively. He's only coming for one year, perhaps, but Mike Ribeiro is good for forty to fifty assists per season. That means Semin will finally have as many chances at even strength as Alex Ovechkin, without having to leave Washington.

Now, whether the Caps choose to match the offers other teams will make for talented winger is up to them. They've certainly shown that if he wants to stay, he will get the opportunity to play his game and help make a good team into a great one.

"I Enjoyed Working For Bruce, and I Enjoy Working With Dale." -George McPhee

At 6:00 of the above video, George McPhee sums up the difference between his working relationships with the last two coaches he's hired. Gary Bettman asks the Caps' GM to contrast current coach Dale Hunter with recently ousted coach Bruce Boudreau and McPhee unleashes possibly the wittiest remark of his career: "I Enjoyed Working For Bruce, and I Enjoy Working With Dale."

A lot of the Caps teams of the last few years certainly have had Bruce Boudreau's stamp on them in little ways, but for every Hershey success story (by the way, doesn't every team call up the best guys on its farm team?) or previous minor league associate (Joe Corvo stands out as someone whose character McPhee would not have pursued on his own, for whom he also overpaid) who came along, there were certainly also plenty of players on the Capitals who McPhee would have liked in any climate, and who fit into the type of club McPhee was building for years before he hired Boudreau to coach it.

Still, for the general manager to distance himself from his last three division-winning clubs and claim a bigger role in the construction of this year's seventh place Capitals is a very strong endorsement of the current group's playoff chances.

An Open Letter to Discover

Re: this stupid ad: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08bAl2bqb0w

Dear Discover Card,

Please cancel my account. As a proud American, I don't want to be identified with anyone who would pass up a chance to visit the white house over stupid political nonsense, let alone over what appears to be just plain racism.

I understand some of the appeal: Tim Thomas overcame a terrible career as a talentless NHL goalie throughout his prime, and has since put up stellar numbers in his late thirties that would have been impossible without steroids. It's clear that he has no fear of a black rubber hockey puck, or of needles, and I can see wanting to associate your brand with that courage.

However, his fear of a Black president makes him a terrible choice for a corporate representative. Tim Thomas' bigoted, ignorant, rude decision not to visit the White House with his team after the Bruins bullied their way to last year's Stanley Cup championship is a reflection of such low character that it reflects badly upon anyone who uses your card.

Worst of all, Discover's new ad campaign portrays this drug-abusing hatemonger as somehow desirable to women, and I'm afraid that if I take out my discover card in public again, people might think that I, too, hold such a low opinion of women.

Thanks for the tiny crumbs of "cash back" over the years that always felt like such a genuine apology for your usurious interest rates and your always-surprising, cleverly hidden finance charges. Thanks for your purchasing power at a fraction of the stores I wanted to shop at. Thanks for taking a nonexistent risk after reading my credit report to lend me a tiny amount of money at an immense profit. I appreciate all you've done for me. However, this ad campaign is incompatible with my patriotism and my belief in the self-evident truth that all men are created equal.

Goodbye, Dicover. Write to me when you sort out your issues. I hope one day we can be friends, and that one day when I see someone else pull you out in the checkout line, I won't be sick. Until then, please send me my last bill and lets get this over with.

Sincerely,

Eli Resnick

Ridiculous Speculation

By the trade deadline, the Caps will have saved enough salary cap space to finish the season with any player available in the league. New coach Dale Hunter's best alums include Rick Nash, Corey Perry and a few young stars tearing up the NHL.

Reading tea leaves before the drink is brewed, if the standings don't change significantly in the next month the aforementioned stars will be out of playoff contention on teams forced to consider how to rebuild for the future, while the Caps, with the timely return of Backstrom and Green, will be looking to add a key player to take them into the playoffs and carry them deep there.

Of course, Corey Perry is the reigning MVP and isn't getting traded this year, and Rick Nash has publicly stated that he won't exercise the no-trade clause in his contract to stop Columbus if it feels it can make its franchise better by letting him go. So a personal connection is unlikely to make much of a difference in making either trade happen.

However, George McPhee has consistently trusted his coaches' input in personnel matters, and if the Caps were able to somehow land Rick Nash without giving up a significant part of their current nucleus, they would instantly be the deepest team in the East. That said, at twenty-eight years old, Nash's best goal-scoring days are probably behind him, and his contract stays expensive for five more years.

Still, there's a lot to be said for picking a year and just going for it, especially a year when the Caps were already the offseason favorites to win the Eastern Conference and didn't seem to have any room for additional talent. Tomas Vokoun is unlikely to stick around at less than three times his current salary. Dennis Wideman is an All-Star now, and gets a raise somewhere.

In the current standings, the Capitals are out of the playoffs, but on paper, they're still the best they've ever been.

How to take fighting out of hockey.

This must be really difficult to understand since the New York Times just ran a three part series lamenting the impossibility of getting NHL players to stop punching each other in the face. The Times cites all kinds of statistics on the growth of fighting in hockey, and the effects of different NHL rules on the level of fighting in the game. They cite new books re-publicizing old research on the dangers of multiple concussions in short time periods to long-term mental stability. There's a lot of studying, generalizing and hand-wringing. It seems like nothing can be done to stop hockey players from punching faces, and it all sounds very scary.

Don't worry, though, America. I will now explain in just one sentence how to stop hockey players from punching you in the face:

Cover your face with a steel cage so anyone who tries to punch your face breaks his hand.


After a few people break their hands open, no one is going to be punching faces anymore.

I grew up as a huge fan of Capitals players like Dale Hunter, Al Iafrate, John Kordic, Nick Kypreos, Alan May and Stephen Peat. These were not gentle, easy-going hockey players. They played as hard as they could, pushing the limits of the game in those days, and they paid any price to dominate their rivals. In all the commotion about Derrick Bougard's tragic death from head injuries sustained as an NHL fighter, no one has brought up the way that a career as an NHL fighter contributed to Kordic's death nearly twenty years ago, leading him down a spiral of head injuries and drug abuse until he died in a shootout with Toronto police, still in his prime. Hunter, of course, was the first hockey player suspended for 21 games, and the first to log a combination of 3,000 penalty minutes and 1,000 points. May, Kypreos and Peake fought more than him some years.

These were my childhood heroes. I got into hockey thinking fighting was awesome. I have played hockey as a child and as an adult, and I have led a league in penalty minutes, mostly logged in the spirit of sticking up for my teammates (with, yes, an occasional blatant trip to maintain a lead). I have never, however, punched a guy in the face during a hockey game, because I understand about relative density, and I can easily tell that the bones and connective tissues in my hands are not as strong as the steel cages on my opponents faces. None of my opponents punched my face, either, because I certainly never left the locker room without my own shiny grate securely triple-snapped in place.

I won't say that hockey became a safe game with just one additional pound of equipment. I still got knocked out once, but that knockout came from hi-fiving a teammate after a win. He lost his balance and fell into me. I lost my balance and fell on my head on the ice. I think his head landed on my shoulder, driving me downward. I skipped the next practice, on my doctor's advice. A week later, I played a game and continued healing properly because nobody even dreamed of trying to punch me in my steel-barred, medieval armored, fist-grating face. If they had, of course, I would have been a good sport and helped them pick up any loose fingers.

Media Bloopers: Anaheim Edition

ESPN reports that Niklas Hagman "was traded to Calgary midway through the 2009-10 season in a deal that brought Dion Phaneuf from Toronto." Phaneuf, who has earned nominations as the NHL's top rookie and top defenseman, was actually traded to Toronto, from Calgary, in surely one of the most surprising hockey trades of the last two years, if not the last decade. The error has been up on ESPN for 22 hours and isn't mentioned in a single comment. This is interesting because it shows both that Canadians don't follow ESPN and that Anaheim fans and writers don't follow hockey.

If any of them did, one of them might have read this.

As a Capitals fan, it's nice to have shaken the stigma of living in a town that hasn't always been a home to the NHL. Let's hope ESPN doesn't impose that stigma on Anaheim now.

Of course, there is certainly one imaginable scenario in which Anaheim fans actually are hockey fans in spite of not noticing which team ESPN says the Leafs' top defenseman plays for: maybe they just don't read ESPN.

Point and Counterpoint: Panthers vs. Caps

At the blatant risk of stating the obvious, the Washington Capitals should be a much better team than the Florida Panthers this year. Some of the biggest headlines of the off-season have come from former Capital and future Panther Matt Bradley's public questioning of current Capital Alexander Semin's motivation to win in the playoffs, but these questions pale in comparison to the struggles Bradley will face in even reaching the postseason with a severely under-stocked club in Miami.

Bradley has suggested that he would rather be on a team where players who get really excited about the playoffs get more playing time in the playoffs. Players like, for instance, Matt Bradley. Of course, in Florida, Bradley still definitely figures to play a fourth line role. But at least now he'll be fighting for minutes behind guys who don't know each other and didn't fit in with their teams last year. Guys like Tomas Fleischmann, who didn't totally gel with the Caps' second and third lines the last couple years, but now is a consensus second liner with the Panthers (if he's healthy (just kidding. Tomas Fleischmann is as healthy as Marin Gaborik)).

Why don't the Panthers have any great players to join Bradley? Well, to make a long story short, the best players they had left two years ago went to Boston for Dennis Wideman, who then went to Washington for a handful of hope. That left the Panthers with a skeleton crew in front of star goalie Tomas Vokoun, who has now also come to Washington because, in his words, the Caps are closer to winning a Stanley Cup than the Red Wings. In response to the constantly replayed headlines from Bradley, questioning whether the Caps are really ready to win it all, Vokoun says he's happier with his Cup chances in Washington than in Florida.

Vokoun shows great character and sportsmanship by praising the changes Florida made this summer to get up to the Salary cap floor. He even said that when he made the decision not to stay in Florida, he had no way of knowing how much the Panthers would improve. That's all very nice of him, but I think if he looks closely at how much the Panthers improved, he'll be even happier he's in Washington.

Florida added two very expensive defensemen this summer. Brian Campbell and Ed Jovanovski combine for a salary cap hit of 11.25 million dollars per year. Between them last year, the Panthers new top pair combined for 41 points. That's one more than Wideman had in an injury-shortened campaign. Wideman's 3.5 million dollar salary is an afterthought on a Caps team where he figures to be the undisputed 5th best defenseman this year.

Florida also added former Caps goalie Jose Theodore, who hasn't done well in the playoffs in over a decade. Theodore won a total of 15 games last year, playing without the Caps. Washington starts the year with two goalies who won thirty games last year, counting Vokoun, who should do a lot better on a solid team.

Florida has picked up a lot of forwards this summer, and they're all good players. Florida will have as many 40+ point players (based on last year's numbers) as the Capitals. But they won't have as many 20+ point players, and they won't have any 50+ point players at all. Stephen Weiss led the Panthers with a hard-fought 49 points last year--the third-best total of his career. Alexander Semin, Nicklas Backstrom and Alex Ovechkin all had terrible years last year because they only scored 54, 64 and 85 points, respectively. The panthers have added some good players, for sure. If they still had even one very good player like Horton to lead them all, they might even make the playoffs, so that Matt Bradley could again whine about his lack of playoff ice time.

Matt Bradley has been a consummate competitor for many years in Washington, and everything he says this summer will help build a healthy fan base in Florida and a healthy rivalry in what could be the last year of the Southeast Division. But in spite of all that, it should be remembered that the only reason Matt Bradley did not sign another contract with the Capitals this summer is that the Capitals did not offer him one.